Search This Blog

SPARQL Via HTTP Methods

Querying the web might get a bit easier, with the union of SPARQL directly with HTTP. TripleSoup, a promising proposal at Apache, aims to expose Triple Stores (RDF databases) directly via HTTP.

This reminds me of URIQA, which is an effort to provide native HTTP methods for accessing metadata about a certain resource. URIQA was interesting because it allows you to say

MGET /foo HTTP/1.1

which means "Retrieve the metadata for resource `/foo`"

It looks like TripleSoup is a bit different, in that the URI in the request methods is some type of application. TripleSoup seems to be a gateway directly into the triple store, whereas URIQA masks the concept of talking to the triple store. In URIQA, it looks like the triple store *is* the server you are connecting to. With TripleSoup, the triple store is located at the URI you are sending requests to.

URIQA's advantage is that you don't need to know the URI to the application or triple store, you can just send an MGET to the resource. Of course, URIQA doesn't handle queries with SPARQL.

My first question with TripleSoup is, how would I discover the URI that I can use for querying? It's the same problem that URIQA tries to solve, "I know the URI for the resource, but I want to get its metadata." I can ask that question in SPARQL, but who do I ask?

Best of luck to the TripleSoup team, really looking forward to the code.

Popular posts from this blog

Now, this has to have a built-in somewhere in Scala , because it just seems too common. So, how to convert an Array to a List in Scala? Why do I need this? I needed to drop to Java for some functionality, which in this case returns an Array. I wanted to get that Array into a List to practice my functional programming skillz. **Update**: I figured out how to convert Arrays to Lists the Scala way. Turns out it's a piece of cake. val myList = List.fromArray(Array("one", "two", "three")) or val myList = Array("one","two","three").elements.toList The call to elements returns an Iterator , and from there you can convert to a List via toList . Nice. Because my first version wasn't actually tail recursive, what follows is a true tail recursive solution, if I were to implement this by hand. The above, built in mechanism is much better, though. object ArrayUtil { def toList[a](array: Array[a]): List[a] = { d

In which I port a snazzy little JavaScript audio web app to Dart , discover a bug, and high-five type annotations. Here's what I learned. [As it says in the header of this blog, I'm a seasoned Dart developer. However, I certainly don't write Dart every day (I wish!). Don't interpret this post as "Hi, I'm new to Dart". Instead, interpret this post as "I'm applying what I've been documenting."] This post analyzes two versions of the same app, both the original (JavaScript) version and the Dart version. The original version is a proxy for any small JavaScript app, there's nothing particularly special about the original version, which is why it made for a good example. This post discusses the differences between the two implementations: file organization, dependencies and modules, shims, classes, type annotations, event handling, calling multiple methods, asynchronous programming, animation, and interop with JavaScript libraries. F

In which the virtues of automated mechanical arboreal pruning are extolled over quaint manual labor, as applied to web development build processes. The setup Ever notice how the primary bit of marketing for many traditional web programming libraries is their download size? Why is that? Check this out: Why does size matter so much for these libraries? Your first instinct is probably, "because the more bytes you shuttle across the wire, the slower the app starts up." Yes, this is true. I'd also say you're wrong. The primary reason that size matters for these libraries is because traditional web development has no intelligent or automated way to prune unused code so you can ship only the code that is used over the wire. The web is full of links, yet web dev has no linker The web development workflow is missing a linking step. A linker's job is to combine distinct project files into a single executable. A smart linker will only incl